Social Selling in Deals

Social Selling in Deals

Social Selling is not just for prospecting. It’s an amazing principle to embrace in every step of the sales process. I was working with a sales team yesterday. We dove into their pipeline and I asked them a bunch of questions about their use of “Social Selling” in their deals.

By looking at one of their largest active deals, and spending less than 3 minutes on Linkedin and the prospect’s corporate Twitter handle, we learned the following:

By looking at Twitter, we learned their prospect is actively doing an ERP/financials evaluation

Their executives are not connected with the prospect’s decision makers on Linkedin

Linkedin is not being used to connect the dots and establish relationships with influencers

Who their competition is on the deal by seeing them following the company on Twitter

The prospect was getting ready for a big new product launch in January

It became apparent they weren’t actively applying “Social Selling” principles in their deals.

Here are some “Social Selling” questions you can ask yourself about your deals:

1. Are you connected with the decision makers and influencers on Linkedin? If you’re not, don’t forget to connect with them and reference your working relationship. This isn’t SPAM. This is a great way to use Linkedin.

2. What common Linkedin relationships do you have? Always be trying to connect the dots. Look to see what common relationships you have with your prospects. Use this information as a conversation starter the next time you meet.

3. Have you browsed your prospect’s corporate twitter handle? Find out what’s top of mind for their company by seeing who they are following, who is following them and what they are tweeting about. Twitter tells a story about what is top of mind in a company and an executive’s mind.

Sales Managers, if you want to inject some practical and immediately usable “Social Selling” principles into the DNA of your sales teams, run the “Social Research Sales Huddle.” Click here to oin SalesHood now, with your sales teams, to apply these best practices to your deals.

About the Author

Elay Cohen

Elay Cohen is the author of SalesHood: How Winning Sales Managers Inspire Sales Teams to Succeed and the co-founder of SalesHood, a SaaS sales enablement platform and community for sales professionals. Elay is the former Senior Vice President of Sales Productivity at Salesforce. Recognized as the company's "2011 Top Executive", and credited for creating and executing all of Salesforce's sales productivity programs that accelerated its growth from $300M to $3B+ in revenue. The sales training and sales support innovations delivered over these years by Elay and his team to thousands of sales reps resulted in unprecedented hypergrowth. He also created the Partner Relationship Management (PRM) category.